NUI Galway’s Irish Centre for Human Rights and An Cumann Staire/History Society will host a Holocaust Memorial Event for 2020 with Tomi Reichental, a survivor of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, and Ben Barkow, former Director of London's Wiener Library. The talk will take place on Wednesday, 29 January, at 6pm in Human Biology Building on campus.  Tomi Reichental was born in 1935 in Piestany Slovakia. In 1944 at age nine, he was captured by the Gestapo in Bratislava and deported to Bergen Belsen concentration camp with his mother, grandmother, brother, aunt and cousin. When he was liberated in April 1945, he discovered that 35 members of his extended family had been murdered. His grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins all died in the Holocaust. Recounting the sights and smells at the concentration camp Tomi said: “Typhoid and diphtheria were the biggest killers, but people were dying of starvation and cold in their hundreds. First the bodies were removed and burned, but later they were just piling up in front of our barracks, there were piles of decomposing bodies. The soldiers who liberated Belsen in April 1945 said they could smell the stench for two miles before they reached the camp. In the camp I could not play like a normal child, we didn’t laugh and we didn’t cry. If you stepped out of line, you could be beaten up even beaten to death. I saw it all with my own eyes.” According to Professor Ray Murphy of NUI Galway’s Irish Centre for Human Rights: ‘Tomi’s message of tolerance and forgiveness is more important today than even. He reminds us of our common humanity and the need for human solidarity.” Ben Barkow recently retired from London's Wiener Library - the world's oldest institution created for the documentation of the Holocaust - where he had worked for 32 years. He is chair of the Academic Advisory Board of the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation, which is creating Britain's national Holocaust memorial next to the houses of Parliament. He is also on the advisory board of the Imperial War Museum's planned new permanent Holocaust exhibition and is a trustee of a number of a number of Holocaust-related charities.  The discussion at NUI Galway will be followed by a Q&A session. Admission is free but early arrival is advised. -Ends-

NUI Galway has announced a new partnership with leading enterprise Robotic Process Automation (RPA) software firm UiPath, making it the University the first in Ireland to offer robotic process automation content to accounting and finance students. At postgraduate level, the partnership will feature as part of an innovative ‘Disruptive Technologies in Accounting and Finance’ Summer School offered to students on the Master of Accounting, MSc in International Accounting and Analytics, and MSc in Corporate Finance programmes. Students will develop practical skills in RPA, mapping of workflow processes, Data preparation and Data Analytics, and Artificial Intelligence (AI). The summer schools are designed for two cohorts of students - those about to commence their accounting/finance careers and early/mid-career professionals wanting to upskill and prepare for a transformed workplace. At undergraduate level, RPA awareness training will also be incorporated into a redesigned first year module offered to all accounting students. Siobhan Ryan, Sales Director, UiPath, said: “Through the Academic Alliance partnership, NUI Galway becomes the first Irish institution of Higher Education to join the programme. This is a timely occasion for Irish students to gather automation skills that are very much needed in the market. We are honoured to have a prestigious institution such as NUI Galway pledge towards aligning their curricula to the industry’s needs and thus include RPA into their accounting and finance curriculum. Within the next short years, both private and public companies will seek new talents, especially in the Finance and Accounting departments and embracing these new technologies will enable students to bring much value to the workplace.” Professor Breda Sweeney, Head of Accountancy and Finance Discipline, J.E. Cairnes School of Business and Economics, NUI Galway, said: “Through our expanding suite of postgraduate summer schools and redesign of undergraduate modules, we are equipping students with cutting-edge skills in RPA and analytics. This will undoubtedly enable them to be at the forefront in meeting the needs of an accounting and finance world that is undergoing radical and rapid transformation.” The summer school will be led by Sharon Cotter, NUI Galway, who has 27 years of experience working in finance functions in industry. The summer school incorporates guest lectures from leading companies in Ireland on their experiences of RPA and practical hands-on workshops in using UiPath software. Sharon Cotter, Lecturer, Accountancy and Finance Discipline, J.E. Cairnes School of Business and Economics, NUI Galway, said: “I am delighted that UI Path are partnering with us and that our students will acquire important learning in accounting and finance, but not as we know it, through the opportunity to engage with the technologies which are disrupting the traditional work of accounting and finance professionals.” For more information about the MSc programmes email accounting@nuigalway.ie or visit http://www.nuigalway.ie/accountancy-finance/. -Ends-

The Health Research Board is funding a pilot project to design and develop the infrastructure needed to share and link data securely. The project will be led by the Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC), which is hosted by NUI Galway  A pilot project funded by the Health Research Board (HRB) to design and develop the infrastructure needed to share and link data securely, is being led by the Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC) hosted by NUI Galway. It will design and test the major infrastructural elements for safe use and linkage of these different data sets using synthetic data, such as fake data that resembles the characteristics of real health datasets Data is one of our most valuable national assets. However, we don’t use it to its full potential because we don’t have the right infrastructure or services in place to share, store or link data safely for research and studies that benefit society. In the Irish health and research ecosystem we routinely collect hospital data, disease registry data, data from longitudinal studies and surveys, census data, administrative data – but currently little can be done beyond their collection and stated use without being in breach of data protection legislation or ethical guidelines. According to Darrin Morrissey, Chief Executive at the HRB:“Gathering robust sets of health data can be expensive and time-consuming, so it makes sense to use them to their full potential. The fundamental question is; how can we ensure data is used or shared safely, ethically and legally? This Proof of Concept initiative will create the blueprints for a future infrastructure in Ireland that will ensure safe access to health data and develop ways to share or link existing data responsibly for the benefit of people’s health and patient care.” The pilot project will build on a model developed by the HRB called ‘DASSL’ (data access, storage, sharing and linkage) which outlines the infrastructure and services to ensure: Safe projects (valid research purpose) Safe people (trusted researchers) Safe data and data governance (people’s data protected) Safe setting (security controls) Safe outputs (disclosure control of outputs) The project represents the first steps to establish a DASSL infrastructure that facilitates the linking of multiple sensitive datasets in a safe environment to harness new insights from existing data. This will greatly enhance the ability to support health service planning and delivery and provide evidence for policy. Similar infrastructures and services are already in place and widely used across Europe, Canada and Australia, but each country would have its own unique requirements and environments. “If upscaled and launched nationally, this infrastructure has the capacity to join the dots between the different datasets to improve people’s health and patient care at an individual and at a population level. It will vastly increase the value that can be derived from individual datasets,” says Dr Morrissey. The two-year project will design and build a prototype technical infrastructure to demonstrate how secure, controlled access for researchers to routinely collected health and social care datasets can be implemented in a safe environment for new types of data analyses that have been intractable in the past. The goal is to lay the foundations for a national infrastructure for data access, sharing, storage and linkage of sensitive health, social care and related data in line with legal and ethical requirements and provide guidelines for the upscaling of the model. A key aspect of the project is to engage with a wide range of stakeholders including patient groups to ensure broad awareness and consultation, to build confidence in the approach and to leverage support for the infrastructure at a national level. Dr Simon Wong who leads the projects at ICHEC and hosted by NUI Galway, said:“This project is a major step in addressing a real gap for the use of health data for research purposes in Ireland. We will be working with a wide range of partners nationally and internationally to ensure that what we build will not just be to the highest standard, but the design incorporates feedback from the Irish health ecosystem, the general public and the research community to ensure trust in the infrastructure.” Professor Lokesh Joshi, Vice President for Research at NUI Galway, said: “ICHEC’s reputation as an internationally recognised centre of excellence in high-performance computing continues to grow. This project strongly demonstrates its focus on the economic and societal benefit which can be had from collaboration and innovative approaches.” ICHEC at NUI Galway, will work with researchers at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, Trinity College Dublin and the Health Service Executive. Working with other national and international collaborators will also be crucial, including those based at the FutureNeuro Research Centre. The DASSL model was first described in a discussion document published by the HRB in 2016 - Proposals for an Enabling Data Environment for Health and Related Research in Ireland. The document voiced the particular challenges in health research where policy relevant studies were abandoned or inordinately delayed, and where the use of routine health data that are collected and maintained at great cost is under-utilised in health services planning, clinical practice and evidence for policy. -Ends-